Competitive analysis is not easy. It takes regular monitoring, lots of research, and compiling all findings into actionable reports, among many other steps. But what if you could make this process ten times more efficient?
Claude is an AI tool with immense potential as a marketing analytics assistant. In this guide, we’ll discover how you can tap into Claude’s capabilities, from conducting research to feeding competitor information you’ve collected into its neural engine.
Learn how you can speed up your current complicated competitor analysis methods with just one powerful chatbot.
However, before we get into the rest of this article, I have to add a disclaimer: AI tools like Claude are not enough for effective and thorough competitive analysis.
For this type of research, you need dedicated competitor tracking tools like Panoramata for a better understanding at what techniques and strategies your competitors are using for their marketing.
Panoramata's competitive intelligence is not limited to search engine results. It can uncover hidden parts of a marketing strategy such as display ads, email newsletters, and landing pages.
Sign up for free to learn more about Panoramata and how it can boost your competitor tracking game.
What is Claude?
Claude is an AI chatbot assistant developed by Anthropic.
Like other chatbots, it can answer questions in a natural, conversational manner and can handle tasks like brainstorming, content summarization, writing code and text, market research, and data analysis.
Claude AI is praised for its ethical standards. The developers of Claude AI trained it based on a constitutional document with principles based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, trust and safety best practices, and non-Western perspectives, among others.
Claude also scored higher benchmark ratings compared to other LLMs like ChatGPT’s GPT3.5 (free model). It can understand longer pieces of text (up to 150 pages) than GPT 3.5 .
Claude tends to be more conversational than ChatGPT and can handle more complex tasks, which means it’s great for competitive analysis too.
Claude AI can also do more than other LLM models, based on evaluations that use blind side-by-side comparisons, evaluations on depth of understanding, and multi-turn question answer tests.
Use Cases of Claude
Some applications of Claude are:
- Create a sales pitch
- Write an app
- Practice interview questions
- Plan a vacation
- Review a contract
- Break down complex ideas
- Analyze code
- Preview code
- Debug issues
- Create reports
- Search the web
- Create visualizations
- Analyze data
- Brainstorm ideas
- Refine concepts
And there are many more uses that can be applied to any industry, business, and user.
Is Claude better than ChatGPT?
Claude has its limitations. While people have noted that Claude AI’s free tier is better than ChatGPT’s free version, ChatGPT-4 (paid tier) still beats Claude’s paid version.
Claude lacks the following abilities:
- Image creation and understanding
- Video creation
- ChatGPT’s code interpreter feature
- Editing documents in the conversation
- Advanced voice mode (can interpret your phone’s screen when toggled on)
ChatGPT has all of the features above. However, for writing, brainstorming, and as a creative tool, Claude is the better AI assistant.
It tends to be more conversational than ChatGPT and can handle more complex tasks, which means it’s great for competitive analysis too.
Two Ways to Use Claude in Competitor Analysis
First approach
First, ask this question to Claude AI: Can you help me do competitor research?
Claude will reply with something like this:
A sample reply you can send is:
- What industry or market are you in? I am in the mattress industry
- Are you looking to research competitors for an existing business or a new venture you're planning? This is for an existing business
- Do you have specific competitors in mind, or are you trying to identify who your competitors are? Identify my competitors.
- What's your main goal - pricing analysis, feature comparison, market positioning, or something else? I want to improve my marketing through competitor analysis.
Here’s what Claude came up with based on that answer.
It identified my competitors and outlined key insights on their marketing strategy. It also showed the industry’s market trends and recommended competitor analysis frameworks for my hypothetical mattress brand to use.
Claude follows up with another question, and I replied with a request to do a deep dive on two competitors it identified: Casper and Purple.
Here’s what it came up with.
It also produced a head-to-head comparison of the two brands’ content strategy, influencer approach, brand positioning, and advertising focus.
Next, Claude asked: “Would you like me to analyze specific campaigns from either brand or help you develop strategies inspired by their approaches?”
I replied with “Help me develop strategies based on their approaches”.
Then I asked it to create a content calendar. It produced a document detailing a 90-day content calendar filled with creative briefs, CTAs, platforms, and goals for each post.
Website Comparison
You can also ask Claude to do a deep analysis and comparison of your website and your competitors’ websites.
You can use this prompt:
For each website, it identified a primary focus, key elements, and strengths and weaknesses.
Then, Claude created recommendations for homepage optimization, both for immediate improvement and mid and long-term optimization.
It even created layout recommendations for a new homepage, complete with copy and social proof ideas.
The document goes into further detail, and its takeaways and thinking were very impressive.
However, by then I reached the limit of my Claude free plan and needed to wait for the next day to use it again.
Second approach
In this approach, you gather competitor data by yourself.
This can be a quicker and more accurate way to perform a competitor analysis because you’re pulling from multiple sources at once and feeding it to the chatbot directly.
Conduct preliminary research on your competitors, assuming you already know who they are.
Open a document and paste everything you know about your competitors’ marketing strategies.
These are some of the information you can put in the document:
- Blog post titles and descriptions
- Ad copy
- Top-performing social media posts’ captions
- Email subject lines and preview texts
- Engagement metrics (likes, shares, etc.)
Do the same thing for your business. Add your blog posts, ad copies, captions, subject lines, and metrics.
Save the file and upload it to a conversation with Claude.
Then, ask: What patterns and techniques do each my competitors use to boost engagement and conversions? Compare our marketing strategies and analyze what makes their marketing effective.
It will then churn out a detailed analysis of your competitors based on the document’s information.
Claude AI for competitive advantage
That ends our guide on the basics of using Claude for competitive analysis. This is scratching the surface of the potential of AI assistants in sharpening your marketing strategy and speeding up your workflow.
Claude is great for interpreting enormous amounts of data at once, as long as you feed it high quality and accurate content about your competitors.
Discover your competitive strengths and take advantage of opportunities with our free SWOT analysis template.
For even better competitor data sourced in real-time from a variety of ad networks, websites, and platforms, check out Panoramata. It can track your competitors for you and give you a comprehensive understanding of what they’re doing that you’re not yet implementing.
If you’d like to learn more about Panoramata, book a demo with us or take it out for a spin by signing up here.
FAQs
What is Claude AI?
Claude is an AI chatbot assistant developed by Anthropic, designed for natural language conversations and tasks like content summarization, writing, and data analysis.
Is Claude better than ChatGPT for competitor analysis?
For writing, brainstorming, and creative tasks, Claude is often considered better due to its conversational nature and ability to handle complex tasks, making it suitable for competitor analysis.
What kind of information can I feed Claude for competitor analysis?
You can provide Claude with various competitor data, including blog post titles, ad copy, social media captions, email subject lines, and engagement metrics, to gain deeper insights.
